The Green Girl
by Mab Browne
Summary: An assignment set before the series - Sapphire and Steel must deal with the threat of the Green Girl.


Time out of mind it was an uneasy place. Before people ever wandered the forest, the animals learned to be wary. Something whispered malevolently in the ground, and in the winter the fallen leaves whirled in flight regardless of the wind. People came, wanderers first and then settlers, and the land changed. Where there had been forest there were earthworks and fields, but one small, boggy patch of wood remained. It was bad luck to disturb it. Everyone knew that, but now and again the curious or the uncaring or the simply foolish would roam amongst the trees, and often enough anyone who cared for those explorers would be left grieved and wondering, because sometimes the men and women who walked under the trees never returned home.

* * *

There was a young man running, stumbling rather, away from the great willow at the centre of the wood. The ground was muddy under his feet, and he slipped and fell, weeping. In amongst the sobs he burst out with words "Bastards! Bastards!" and the wail of a name "John... oh, God, John!" He lifted his face from the muck and started like a surprised animal, before pushing himself to his knees to stare transfixed, dark eyes widening in astonishment, before he ducked his head. Even in the midst of grief and terror, he was ashamed to present such a spectacle of himself in front of a lady and a gentleman.

"You're distressed." It was the woman who spoke. She was blonde and lovely, and her voice was rich and compassionate. The young man wiped futilely at his face, but succeeded only in smearing the mud and the tears and the snot even further over what would have been an attractive face if clean.

"I'm sorry, mis'ess. But you shouldn't be here, you shouldn't " He choked, and scrambled to his feet, addressing the man who stood nearby. "You should take her and leave, straight 'way."

The man stared at him, assessing, and impatient with it. "And why should we do that?" He was fair-haired also, and good-looking.

"It's not safe!"

The woman stretched out her arm, clad in fine blue cloth and lace, and indicated a fallen tree. "Sit down here, Nicholas. It's drier than the ground."

"I'll not stay here!" Nicholas proclaimed. "I'll not!"

"Then what will you do?" the man questioned.

"I'll go and I'll kill that snake in the grass, Sayer. I'll kill him like he killed John."

"A matter for the constable, surely?" the woman asked.

Nicholas sat on the tree trunk and began to rock back and forth. "Constable would never believe me. Ah, God..." He moaned, nearly weeping again, never thinking to ask how this lovely stranger knew his name. The woman exchanged a look with the man, and then she stooped and took Nicholas's hands in hers.

"Tell me," she coaxed, and a tremor ran through Nicholas and the wood both.

"Nicholas Forde," Sapphire relayed to Steel. "Aged twenty-seven, will die in another fifteen years, all things continuing as they ought. Entirely human." Nicholas showed no sign that he'd heard her but then, if he had, he wouldn't have been an ordinary man.

"And the cause of all _this_?" Steel's distasteful emphasis indicated Nicholas's desolate state.

Sapphire turned her head and smiled quizzically. "He's just seen his brother die, Steel, in a way quite out of the usual. And he *is* entirely human."

"Well, I presume that you can successfully get him out of our way if he has another fifteen years of life left to him."

Nicholas had bowed his head after the first touch of Sapphire's hands, completely unaware of this brusque dismissal of the central event of his life. "John's gone," he whispered. "It were just a sapling, a little twig and John said that a willow branch were a willow branch whether it come from a young tree or an old, and then it..." He wept again.

"And then?" Sapphire said aloud.

"You won't believe me!" It was a wail.

"But I will. I promise."

"It were a grown tree again, a great willow with gnarled roots, and John weren't there, but I could see his face. I could see his face in the tree, and I'll kill Michael Sayer for sending us to this place. 'Bring us a twig from the Green Girl' they all said. Joke, they all called it. I call it murder. Murder!"

"Hush now. Go home." Sapphire's voice was soothing, gentle, but there was iron authority underneath it.

Nicholas stared up at her, blinking. His tears had left dirty tracks across the muck on his face. "And what'll I say, without John? I can't tell the truth. It'd be the constable after me, instead."

"Then wait here, until we come back." And with that, the two of them, slender woman and slender man, both dressed in the height of fashion, promenaded into the wood as if they were walking the pavement in some fashionable town, leaving Nicholas to gape at their passing.

* * *

The wood knew many trees, mainly oak and alder and beech, but the men and women who populated the farmland about it knew that in the middle of the wood was a large willow the Green Girl, the locals called it. It rose near a tiny spring, and its great roots, as spread out and bulky as its branches, surrounded and embraced the pool.

Sapphire and Steel picked their way across the ground to stop some distance from the willow, which stood wedded to the ground like any other tree.

Steel frowned. "You'd think that they'd have learned not to poke at what they know is dangerous."

"It's in their nature," Sapphire said. Her beautiful costume wasn't disturbed or besmirched by their wanderings, any more than was Steel's fashionable grey attire. "And we're not so very different." She smiled dazzlingly at Steel, who shrugged, apparently unimpressed.

"We interfere to a purpose," he declared.

"And that makes all the difference after all," said Sapphire. Steel looked at her, unsure how he should take that remark. Sapphire was known to be difficult on occasion. It was one reason why they'd been paired; they were two of a kind.

"Let's get on with it, then." Steel gestured, the way that human men did here, a mock-courtly gesture of permission. Sapphire's expression became mischievous, although that died away as she turned to her work.

"So very, very unstable here. No wonder they usually leave this place alone. Even humans can feel *something*."

"But still there are idiots like that Nicholas."

"They're curious, and to be fair " Sapphire made a small noise of surprise.

"What? What is it?" Steel put his hand on her shoulder.

"It's all right." Sapphire laid her own hand upon his. "It does rather call. No wonder people still come wandering here."

"There's a consciousness here?"

Sapphire shut her eyes, her fingers tightening upon Steel's. "Yes," she said, lost for a moment in reverie, "yes." Her eyes opened, blindly luminous with power. "Isn't there always when we're needed?"

"What sort of consciousness?"

Sapphire was silent.

"What sort of consciousness, Sapphire?"

"Feel for yourself," she said, irritated suddenly, surrounded, infused with power and memories, and pushed the images in her mind straight to his.

* * *

To those within time, what is outside it is inconceivable. And for that which is outside time, what is inside time is confusing and constrained, but sometimes malleable, sometimes useful.

What was outside time found a place (a confusing concept in itself) where it could influence, where it could, if not control, then at least persuade - draw closer, embody. But the movement that humans and a few others called time was baffling and obscure. Enlightenment and control were paramount, and there was a vessel, a young woman bearing a willow sapling in an osier basket, both the woman and the sapling precious to her dispossessed people. Calling, seduction, the promise of something that would never be taken away, tendrils in a mind.

But there was no enlightenment, only madness, and the only control was the manipulation of that movement called time backwards, forwards, sideways. Seeking, always seeking, but never finding, and the new minds were of no use either. They only shrieked their denial and horror; what took them was incomprehensible and it swiftly broke them, without that intention. But now, instead of mere minds, there was power standing near the Green Girl, understanding and comprehension. And to gain those things there must be attraction, and then assimilation.

* * *

Steel shuddered at the alien intrusion and, repulsed, lurched back, feeling the coolness of air against his hand where before he'd felt Sapphire's touch. It was the wrong decision; he understood that immediately, but it was too late by then. Training was one thing, but the field was more immediate, more visceral, more surprising. Sapphire turned to stare at him, and then with a sweetly delirious smile she stretched out her arms and walked towards the tree.

It had been daylight when they walked into the wood, daylight when Sapphire stretched out her arms, but now it flashed night black, then day again, a lightning strike of images against Steel's vision, the rush and roar of manipulated time against his skin. A skinny sapling tree drawing a protective cage of human bodies about it, a grown, verdant tree with shapes and faces writhing within its bark, a stark grey shape at the end of the long, long journey with living skeletons caught within all of that in an instant and an eternity, because time was nothing to the Green Girl, nothing and everything because time had inadvertently become its prison and more than anything it yearned for freedom.

Whatever you want, whatever you need that was the song, and Sapphire, more attuned to the minds and needs of humans, stepped forward to embrace the promises made to humans for so very many years.

Steel grabbed for her, but between one flash of time and next she eluded him, walking between eras as easily as putting one foot in front of the other. She was gone from Steel's sight, only to reappear some five steps ahead of him, and that was the point where without thought or care he leapt, and tackled her to the ground, her hands still outstretched towards the tree, her lips caught back from her teeth in a snarl.

"Sapphire!" He called her name, shouted it with all the power at his command, unable in this moment to afford the luxury of shame at his mistake. "Sapphire!" Heavy, he must be heavy; they had to be anchored to this place and *this* time, and slowly, slowly she came back to him, and her lips curved in a smile.

"You do realise that in the context of this setting and culture that this is highly improper?" But her inner voice was filled with amusement, however shaky, and Steel rose and took her hand to help her to her feet.

"Is that all the thanks I'm getting?" he asked.

Sapphire touched his cheek, her face stilled. "Yes," she said gently, "and you know why."

Steel averted his eyes, only for a moment, and then gazed at the Green Girl with loathing.

"It's limited, at least," he said.

"True. But it's still dangerous."

"It's become too bound with the tree, and the humans it's taken."

"Yes," Sapphire replied, a slight frown marring her forehead. Steel could feel it now, the connection between them that he should have established much sooner and not just physically. She took his hand in hers, and he knew that he was forgiven for now. "It would be a kindness to free them."

Steel thought of the shapes writhing within the bark and shuddered. "Yes. But how?"

"Power," Sapphire said with irritating surety.

"We'll just snap our fingers, shall we?"

"Four days ago there was a thunderstorm here." Sapphire's nervousness thrummed gently through the link between them.

"Dangerous," Steel commented. "But then, when isn't it?" He stared up at the overcast sky visible through the shifting branches. "The sooner the better, then."

"I think so." Sapphire turned to him, so that they stood with both their hands clasped, fingers linked and entwined like the twisted roots of the tree.

"Take us back, Sapphire. Take us back to the storm." Then Steel shut his eyes, and sank into the pulse of power that sounded around them. Sapphire's eyes shone, the power she was drawing radiating through the wood and they were gone, swimmers cleaving their way through a current.

It was dark when they reappeared, three days and eighteen hours earlier. The thunder shook the ground, and torrential rain beat down, over the wood, over the farmland, over the houses and the villages all about.

Sapphire swayed in exhaustion. "We're here," she murmured.

"Yes. Yes, we are. Well done," Steel said and lowered her to sit upon the ground.

Sapphire blinked up at him, surrounded but not quite touched by the rain, and touched for a moment by the uncommon praise. "Be careful."

"I'm always careful," he said to her in mock affront.

She shook her head. "That's not what Lead tells me."

"But Lead's not here." Steel hoped that was a good sign, and looked up once again at the sky, as an actinic blaze briefly lit the land about them. He turned to face the willow, and shut his eyes once more, tracing the unnatural life within it. Perhaps two thousand years this tree had been here, shaped by trapped forces, both human and inhuman, breaking universal laws merely by existing. Enough. Destroying it would be almost ridiculously easy, a proposal sound enough in principle. The raw power that sang in the sky would be easy enough to harness even humans were beginning to do it now. Harnessing was one thing, directing was another, and not even Steel's dour sense of duty could resign him completely to the prospect.

He had to touch the willow, had to hold the Green Girl, and he laid hands upon the hunched roots with active nausea. Cold, he was cold. Cold was its own power, the emptiness of void, but this wasn't his coldness. His hands ringed the narrow trunk of a sapling, while a grave-eyed woman clasped his hands within hers, merging them both into the tree's living wood. He inched under bark like a worm under the ground, and met the terrified gaze of John Forde, their bodies subsumed, their blood turned to sap. With a shout of denial, Steel wrenched himself to the night of the storm. No grey, petrified wood at the end of all things for him, although what he had to do was almost worse than that.

Physical he was elementally physical, he was energy that rode the night sky, he was a being tied to *this* place and *this* moment of time, and he called the lightning down to this one place and screamed as it sizzled through the sky and struck the Green Girl.

Sapphire sat patiently for nearly twenty-four hours before Steel woke, raising his head from his resting place in her lap.

"Did it work?" he asked hoarsely, before irritation crossed his face at the folly of the question. If he'd failed there wouldn't have been such a peaceful awakening.

"Manifestly," Sapphire told him.

"Then we're done here?"

"For now."

That made him wince. Sapphire's laughter hung in the air for just a moment after they were gone.

* * *

Not quite three days later, Nicholas Forde and his brother John found a blackened, blasted stump instead of a verdant willow tree, and the ground scattered with shattered wood and branches, and shattered bone too, if they'd only known. But they didn't know, and they lived out their lives, and John Forde buried his brother when the pneumonia killed him three days after his forty-second birthday.

It took another fifty years before the wood was cleared to add to the farmland, the spring become a small well, and many more years after that before there were houses built there, with the spring trapped in pipes and drains..

Number eleven Willow Close is empty more often than not. They say that it's haunted.


End file.
